Cancer⁃associated bowel obstruction which often occurs in advanced abdominal and pelvic malignancies causes severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, difficulty eating and other symptoms. It can seriously affect the patient′s quality of life and has been a tricky problem for clinicians.Surgical treatment that is one of the important methods mainly includes bowel stent placement and operation, and its primary purpose is to relieve the obstructive symptoms of patients and improve the quality of life. Among them, bowel stent placement has some characteristics of simple operation and less trauma, and can also provide a transitional period for some patients to undergo subsequent operation, but it may increase complications, such as perforation, survival time shortening or tumor recurrence increasing. Operation mainly includes palliative resection, radical resection, enterostomy, short⁃circuit operation. The postoperative time of intestinal patency and survival time of patients may be better than the application of intestinal stent, but it has some risks, such as postoperative anastomotic fistula and incision infection. There are still some controversies about the surgical treatment of cancer⁃associated bowel obstruction to choose bowel stent placement or operation, because of the advantages and disadvantages to the both methods. This article mainly review the application,the methods of treatment, the related risks of bowel stent placement and operation, and other therapies in cancer⁃associated bowel obstruction.